Runbow: Interview with 13AM Games

13AM actually stands for 13 alive meerkats, to celebrate one of our former members’ dream to have a small petting zoo filled with meerkats at his house. Am I telling the truth? Who can say…

Why did you release Runbow on Wii U and not on another console?

When we set out to make Runbow, we really wanted to make the biggest local multiplayer experience anyone had ever seen. We of course added tons of content for single players and online as well, but when we looked at the current console generation the most players we could get in there was on the Wii U. Add to that the GamePad that let us make ColourMaster, our Wii U-exclusive asymmetrical mode, and we couldn’t see any other obvious choice.

Runbow supports color-blind peoples. Did you get reactions/feedback from players out there?

We have received tons of positive feedback about our choice to do this, but it was something we always wanted to do, even from the beginning. We always said that we want as many people as possible to play Runbow and when it came down to deciding tonal values for our 6 customizable colour palettes, we had to take into consideration that some people can’t see certain hues. Every colour we have is meant to stand out against the other colours in its palette even in black and white, so it gets the job done for a lot of people. It’s really helpful for competitive games that the entire audience is able to stay competitive, so it seemed like a no-brainer for us.

Recently Runbow was part of a Humble Bundle. Do you have stats how much impact this action had on the online multiplayer?

We do! It has impacted it ENORMOUSLY. We’ve been seeing numbers that are higher than our highest online stats to date, all because we agreed to be bundled up with a bunch of brilliant Nindie titles. It’s now way easier to find people online and the matches are still as crazy as ever. I think the whole bundle sold 165,000 copies or something along those lines, and to just think that more than half of those people now own Runbow is making me incredibly, incredibly happy.

Mario Kart got successors. Bomberman got successors. Will we see successors for Runbow?

Hm. It’s hard to say right now, because we have a ton of other games we want to work on as well. We do know one thing, we’re not done with Runbow as you know it yet and have a bunch more pretty interesting plans to reveal in the coming months, and hey, if we do decide to make a Runbow 2 we can promise we’ll try to make it even bigger and even better than this one. (Thanks for lumping us in with Mario Kart and Bomberman though… that means a lot 😉 )

We have to ask: Tell each favorite character color from the whole developer team.